Adventurers Affecting Change

In my last post I described some of my work on the ritual/spell system I’ve done for the game I’m developing. It’s been a long, slow process just getting here, but it feels like it’s starting to pick up speed. I’ve written maybe two rituals/spells before, so I’ll probably work out descriptions through trial-and-error.

It’s my impression that powerful, world-altering spells would probably be developed based on the needs of the people developing them — hence the earthworks/signal tower/tunneling rituals. I also want the rituals to reinforce the stronghold/city-state stuff that characters get as they rise through the levels.

Some of the rituals will have pretty obvious military applications and that’s intentional — it’s my hope that your typical campaign can hit the “DotA” phase somewhere between the hypothetical Heroic and Paragon tiers before moving on to bigger and badder war stuff in the late-Paragon and Epic tiers.

If I can pull this off, your tabletop RPG will have its adventuring, raiding, and loot-gathering phase before moving on to a Catan-like, city-building and settlement-development phase, before moving on to a Risk-esque world domination phase — or world-saving, if you have a rare group of selfless PCs.

I figure making all this stuff integral to the advancement of characters should simultaneously make it easier to “scale up” adventures and make accessible some of the really big, world-altering magic. I mean, it’s hard to grasp the implications of epic-tier magic like “create life,” unless you’ve committed a few acts of genocide.

I’m fully aware that this will increase the Cruelty Potential in the game, but it should simultaneously increase the Caring Potential in the game. If you’ve ever wanted a bit of Civilization in your D&D, then this will be the game for you.